Upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. Painless upgrade, nice changes to the dashboard.

Integrated My Flickr page into the website using a Wordpress plugin called Slickr.

The results can be seen here on the Photo Gallery Page, so far I’m happy with the results. The only thing I’d like to see different is the ability to define a ‘default’ photo set to display when the page is loaded. Maybe if i get board I’ll add that in.

I also updated the theme to be widget aware, and added the slickr widget to the sidebar.

Oh how I hate email. Ken posted the following to twitter:

Man, I have a crapton of email. Is it healthy to carry around this much baggage?

and

Consolidating inboxes for a Google Apps for Your Domain migration. My spam folder has 13,000 messages over the last five years!

Twitter has its place, but discussion isn’t one of them. For those didn’t have the misfortune of twitter texting them about this, here is a quick recap:

Michael Bond @kenwalker treat email like postits. Read it, delete it. Move useful information to ical, yojimbo, etc. try to keep email to 50 msgs or less

Ken Walker @mbond I get the GTD angle of keeping the inbox clean, but do you keep messages for up to a specified period of time? I mean deleted and sent items

Michael Bond @kenwalker Email is a communication tool like a phone call. Do you record and archive your phone calls? I delete sent/deleted items daily.

Ken Walker @mbond Fair point. I keep everything indexed and searchable at work, which has saved me from ti… Read more at http://tinyurl.com/yo8lkh

To be more verbose:

Email has its place, but it hasn’t evolved much since the first email message was sent. Its still a simple file that has a series of headers, a body, and possibly a mime attachment. Thats it. You can’t assign meta data to it. Searching and sorting is limited to headers, which may or may not exist depending on where it is from, and the actual content of the email. Some basic meta-data has been hacked on by adding more headers, but different email programs handle them in different ways.

Email, at a quick glance, is a great way to store a lot of information. You can sort it out into folders, based on header information, and you can search for information based on the content of the email. Apple’s Mail.app even takes it a step further and introduces smart folders. All of this is just a brute force effort to keep an aging system in place.

Please for the love of god, stop.

Read the email, if it has information that is worth saving the information is worth moving to another location. If it contains phone numbers, put it in your contact software (Address Book). If it contains dates and appointments, put it into iCal. If it contains action items/todo’s move it to your todo list (Things). If you have documents, put them on your hard drive. If you have receipts, serial numbers, notes, and anything else worth keeping drop it into Yojimbo. Then if you need to search for something later on, use Spotlight searching to find it. You have access too all the Metadata goodness then.

We live in a word where people Twitter all day long, IM each other, Blog, Spend hours cataloging their music, dvd’s, books, and games with metadata off Amazon so its ‘just right’. Their photo’s and home videos get the same treatment of not only tags but geo-tagging and linking to google maps. Yet people are content having their daily lives be completely metadata-less by keeping all of their information in email instead of moving it to specialized databases.

This is just one of my pet-peeves about email. The list goes on, including using email for the wrong reasons. Much like twitter is the wrong place to have a discussion email is the wrong place to send tweats. 2 word “thank you” or “OK” or “I’ll get right on that” emails are a complete waste. PLEASE don’t send them.

Oh, how i long for a true communication solution. 1 Address to send me tweats, emails, instant messages, SMS text messages. A nice XML Format that is easy to parse and use, with lots of future expandability, meta-data out the arse, links out to external applications (think, highlight->right click->send to) and the file system (for attachments). Threaded conversations that involve multiple people. The technology is there, its just that the world is wedded to the aging email and brute forcing new ideas into an old system that was never designed to handle what people want it to do.

A new HD DirecTV satellite setup: $100

Two year contract with DirecTV for HD programming: $1440

Calling Comcast Cable to tell them that your DirecTV Satellite is working during a storm, but the cable is out: Priceless

Internet Explorer has this wonderful thing called conditional comments.

All browsers should support conditional comments. Something off 1 pixel in safari? No Problem. add a style that moves that one element 1 pixel over for that browser. Problem is fixed, without pulling out any hair.

No more dirty-as-all-hell CSS Hacks because one browser handles something slightly different than another (or has a nasty bug in one version).

Now, back to trying to figure out how to move something 3 pixels to the right in Safari, but not in Firefox or IE.

Apparently I am late to the game on this, but …

Last night I discovered a terminal for Linux called Tilda. Its a drop down console, that slides in from the top of the screen. Neat little applications that I immediately fit into my work flow while on Linux. I assigned the hot key to ctrl+` (the default is F1).

I live in the terminal on both Linux and MacOS X, and my usage falls into two categories.

1) Light : i need to type something quick to do something or grab some output. usually a 1 liner, sometimes a couple 1 liners strung together.

2) SSH and Compiling : I have a terminal window open for an extended period of time, to watch the output of a compile or while i’m ssh’d into a remote box.

Tilda fits #1 perfectly. I’m always opening another terminal to type something real quick, then closing it. I generally have 5 or 6 terminals open, ssh’d into various boxes or running something that I need to check on from time to time, so I close the ‘light usage’ terminal when i’m done with it to reduce desktop clutter.

So, I started searching for something like Tilda for OS X. after 15 minutes of searching I came across Visor. Visor is a SIMBL hack that does almost the same thing as Tilda (minus a couple features, like tabs).

Success! Almost. It has a couple of problems.

1) It doesn’t honor color settings from terminal.app … Work around: quit terminal.app; open terminal.app; activate visor; right click in visor and open ‘Window Settings’; adjust everything in there but DO NOT set as default (you don’t want your normal terminal windows to span the screen).

2) Every time you launch terminal.app visor’s height grows by 1 line. There are a couple work arounds out there for this problem, but I wasn’t happy with any of them so here is mine:

• Download visorfix.sh (does the same thing as the little C application off macosxhints.com, but in a shell script.)
• Move it into /usr/bin (so its available to all users)
• Modify your ~/.bash_profile to include the following alias (replacing 25 with the size of your choice):
• alias resetvisor=’defaults write com.apple.Terminal VisorTerminal -dict-add Rows 25;visorfix;killall Terminal’
• open a new terminal and type “resetvisor”

Its a bit of a hack, but it seems to fix the problem. Chances are if you find this useful you don’t close terminal.app very often anyway, so you shouldn’t have to run it very frequently.

You’d think there would be an easy reference to this somewhere, but it is spread all over the place. So, here it is for easy reference.

Linking AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and Skype from a webpage … the following goes into the href attribute on the anchor tag.

AOLIM : aim:goim?screenname=AIMScreenName

MSN : msnim:chat?contact=PassportID

Yahoo! : ymsgr:im?user=YahooIDHere

Skype : skype:SkypeUserName

*Note: the MSN link only works in the newer versions of the client.

If you know how to link to screen names on other services shoot me an email and I’ll add it.

[update 11/30/2006 : Added a couple more apps to the list.]

Recently received a new Intel PowerMac Pro at work … fast machine. I finally finished getting everything setup on it and feel compelled to share my everyday software list with the world, if for no other reason to than to get the previous blog entry off the main page.

AdiumX : Chat Client, with tabs.

DockStar : Notes email totals in your dock for Mail.App. It can show up to 5 counts on your Mail.App icon at one time. Very handle if you track multiple email accounts.

FileMaker Pro : Database software. Kinda like Microsoft Access, but Filemaker Pro sucks a little less.

Firefox : Best Web Browser out there for ANY operating system. Get it. Now.

Flip4Mac : Windows Media Player plugin for Quicktime. Microsoft no longer develops media player for the Mac, but this is their ‘official’ work around. Seems to work well.

iCliplite : Clip Board tool that sits on your dashboard. Very useful when i’m coding to store multiple passages of code that I may frequently use.

Menu Calendar Clock : This is what the clock in the Mac Status bar should have been. Best part is all the useful features are in the free version.

Microsoft Office 2003 : The only ‘really good’ software Microsoft has ever developed.

Missing Sync : Syncs my palm with iCal, Address Book, iPhoto, iTunes, etc …

NetNewsWire : RSS News Reader

Overflow : Application Launcher. Hit a hot key (user configurable) and up pops the launcher on your screen. Beats having the Application folder in your dock.

Parallels : Just started using this software when I got the new mac. Lets you run a virtual install of another OS in a window, much like VMWare. This means I can have windows running at the same time as MacOS X for those couple Admin tools (user/computer management) that I need at work.

Photoshop : I wish the gimp ran better on OSX than it does. Still requires X11, which really puts me off.

StuffIt Expander : Apparently this free app is no longer included in MacOS X, and MacOS X cannot uncompress .sit files natively. So you get to sign up for spam (they email you a download link) to get this … Or you can click just click here to grab it :-P.

Synergy : iTunes interface. There is lots of software which does this now, I bought this one way back when there were less options so I continue to use it.

TextMate : Best text editor on MacOS X … this is the one that pulled me away from using Emacs on my Mac. I basically live in my text editor (22 textmate windows open right now), i highly recommend this one.

Transmit : sftp/ftp client. Nice client that handles editing with external editors really well. Needed a replacement for Emacs Tramp when I moved to textmate.

VirtueDesktops : Virtual Desktops on MacOS X. Previously I used Codetek’s Virtual Desktop Pro, but it is not yet available in a universal binary and has trouble on Intel Macs. VirtueDesktops lacks some of the features, but seems to do the job well enough until Leopard is released, which will include ‘Spaces’

Yojimbo : Information management. Stores Serial Numbers, passwords, notes, web pages, printed PDFs, and book marks. Lots of software out there that does this, but I think Yojimbo has the best interface … its dead simple to use. I have this open several times a day to retrieve information.

So, I’ve been messing with this site called MacHeist.com. Its a bit of a game, where you solve various puzzles and get some free mac applications and discounts on the final bundle of software (no idea what it is). Currently we are in Week 2, and have had 3 heists (puzzles) to open the vault hiding the free software.

One of the programs to come out of this weeks heist is called 1Passwd. At its roots it is a password manager, but includes things like auto complete on web forms and .Mac sync between multiple computers. Give it a try.

(This message has been brought to you by a possible mini-heist. I don’t endorse or use 1Passwd myself, and i feel really dirty about mentioning something that I don’t use, but it MIGHT get me some free software … everyone has their price, apparently mine is free software –Mike)

UPDATE: Hubert visited and left a link to http://whoishubert.com/ It appears that different people are getting different clues left in their blog comments for the next heist (mini-heist?).

Ever try to install a Palm Pilot on a computer on a corporate network? Its a PITA. For some reason Palm assumes that all people on a corporate network are running as a local administrator and aren’t being restricted in anyway. This is a very DUMB for them to assume. It also makes life difficult for those of use that have to install and maintain palm software.

After fighting with it for years, i’ve found the following to work best on Windows XP SP2 with any version of a Palm Pilot:

• Install the software that comes with the Palm m130. NOT the software you can download off of Palm’s website, but the stuff from the CD. The current version of Palm Desktop will Freeze at the splash screen on startup as a restricted user. If you contact Palm this is a known issue, with the solution of ‘give the user local administration privileges.’ The m130 software, however, runs just fine with one small drawback that i’ll mention later.

• Follow the installation as normal, entering the username on the palm and skipping the registration. Exit the install application.

• Sync the palm as Administrator. You may receive an error at this step with the newer palms, see below.

• Run Palm Desktop as Administrator

• Give “Domain Users” (or “Everyone” if you’re that sorta person) full permissions to c:\Palm, propagate the permissions through the directory.

• Move “c:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\Palm Desktop” to “c:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\All Users\Desktop” (or delete it). Give the users permissions to use it.

• Export “HK_CURRENT_USER\Software\USRobotics” from the registry and drop it somewhere the normal user can find it. Make sure they have permissions to it.

• Logout Administrator and in as the User (You will have to perform the follow steps of each user that will be using the Palm Pilot).

• Exit Hotsync, by right clicking it in the task bar.

• Double click the exported registry file to merge it with the users.

• Restart Hotsync from the Start Menu.

• Sync the palm as the User.

• Open up Palm Desktop, and you should be good to go.

So .. now that its installed and running, what is this one small drawback? On the newer Palm Pilots notes will not sync properly. The sync log mentions a database incompatibility, but this doesn’t seem to be an issue for any of my users.

Problems with newer Palm Pilots:

When you sync as administrator for the first time it finds the Palm and installs the drivers for it. If you have a newer palm (say a Tungsten E/2) it will not install properly because the disk that came with the m130 doesn’t have the right driver. Go through the install and point the New Hardware Wizard to the disc that comes with the newer Palm, you should be able to navigate to the drivers on there. Once those are installed, just sync the palm again and it should work.