Saturday, December 15th, 2007
Rocky Fetching, Fighting the Roomba
Our boy continues to be quite the fun addition to the family. He can run around playing fetch all day. He also likes to fight with Little Buddy (a.k.a. our Roomba). I think we should teach him to ride it around.
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
A clean, fast Markdown implementation in python.
Monday, October 22nd, 2007
We love our little 4-month-old Chihuahua we adopted on 20-Oct-2007. He also loves to play with his inverted self in the mirror …
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
Clean up your Contextual Menus
Thanks to this TidBITS article, I was tipped off to find this Mac OS X Hint about how you can rebuild the Launch Services database that determines which applications show up in your “Open With” contextual menu. My Open With had a huge amount of cruft accumulated over time with Classic apps, apps on my backup hard drive, and an annoying number of image droplets in the Photoshop/Samples/Droplets folder.
So I rebuilt my Launch Services database to make my Open With much cleaner and faster. Here’s how I did it.
Eject my backup hard drive so that the database doesn’t include duplicate copies of all my applications.
Archive the Photoshop/Samples/Droplets/ folder (right click, Create Archive, then delete the folder).
Add the following line to my ~\.profile so typing the lsregister command is easier. (alias ... should all be on one line)
# make launch services register easy to find
alias lsregister='/System/Library/Frameworks/
ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/
LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister'
Save a description of the old database (out of curiosity, not necessary).
lsregister -dump | less > lsregDumpOld.txt
Rebuild the database. (all on one line)
lsregister -kill -r -f -domain system -domain system
-domain user "/Applications"
Save a description of the new database (again just curious).
lsregister -dump | less > lsregDumpNew2.txt
The new database is now about 1 MB, down from the original 6 MB. There sure was a lot of junk in there!
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
Steve vs. Alan on Hearing High Stuff
I can hear up to 17.1kHz. Steve can only hear up to 14.7kHz. So I win this round. Although maybe that means he can save more disc space and compress his MP3s a little more?
If you want to perform your own test, you can use Python on Windows as follows:
from winsound import Beep
Beep(14000, 1000)
14000 is the frequency 14kHz and 1000 is beep duration 1000ms (1 second). Crank up the frequency until you can’t hear it.
Update: alternate MATLAB one-liner for doing the same:
f=15000;fs=44100;sound(sin(f*2*pi*[0:fs-1]/fs),fs)
Update 2: Paul says he can hear up to 16.9kHz well but also claims to faintly hear 18-20kHz. I think that means he wins, because I cannot hear above 17.1kHz at all. He said he used headphones whereas I used crappy laptop speakers, so I consider that cheating a little.
Update 3: So apparently, the results are very dependent on the speakers being used. I tested Amanda at home using the Bose speakers and she can hear up to 17.5kHz. Funny thing: with these speakers, I can hear up to about 18.4kHz. Not sure what to make of that except that I’m winning again.
Monday, October 15th, 2007
Maybe the funniest SNL Digital Short yet.
Monday, October 15th, 2007
Hidden Dictionary on The New York Times
Woah, I just randomly double-clicked a word while reading an article nytimes.com and it popped up a definition/theauraus with information on that word. Seems to work while reading articles, but not on the front page.
It is actually more than just a dictionary. For example, go read about Led Zeppelin finally doing digital downloads and when you click Zeppelin, it gives a short bio on the band. Says it’s powered by Answers.com.
Saturday, October 13th, 2007
Hack the iPhone is the best site that collects iPhone hacks, how-to’s, and downloads. Installer.app is a package manager that lets you install, update, and uninstall a great variety of 3rd party iPhone software. Awesome. Finally, iFuntastic lets you change your icons, backgrounds, and install apps.
Update: The iPhone Dev Wiki gives the most updated info on current hacking status, including a list of working native apps.
Also, iPhone Alley has some great news and guides.
Also also, iPhonegoboom has good warnings.
Saturday, October 13th, 2007
Great Python articles, books and downloads. Visit and enjoy. I especially enjoyed this optimization of a log file parser.
Some other interesting articles:
Friday, October 12th, 2007
I’m starting to really like the Humanized weblog. A few interesting articles:
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Adam Engst of TidBITS has me convinced to try Twitter.
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
Suppose you are using Subversion to manage your code and find that you’d like to include revision information within a file. You might read this and think it won’t work, but do not be dismayed. You really wanted to look at Keyword Substitution in the Subversion book.
There you will find that enabling substution on a file is rather easy. Say you have some code in Spam.py and you’re running TortiseSVN. Then, the basic process is:
svn:keywords with value Date Revision Author HeadURL Id$Id$ in the docstring of Spam.py. Id is a summary which, after checking in, expanded to "$Id: Spam.py 513 2007-10-10 23:10:30Z username $".Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
On Mac OS X, Hex Fiend handles editing of binary files beautifully. On occasion, I also need to munge around with large hex files on Windows. Today, I found the XVI32 hex editor — it does the job nicely, letting me delete out segments and re-save the result. It probably wouldn’t work as well with extremely huge files because it does everything in-memory, but for 300MB files, it works great.
Friday, October 5th, 2007
Check out this great book online (there is a print version too).
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
In the never-ending search for commuting content, I stumbled upon listening to words. It has a decent collection of interesting video and audio lectures available for free. Give it a listen.
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
A CSS framework that “gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.” Check it out. By the way, Google Code is starting to host some great stuff lately …
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
Sometimes it is nice to be able to send huge files to people over the web without hosting a server. pando and YouSendIt are both good solutions for doing that. Pando gives 1GB free while YouSendIt gives 2GB.
Saturday, September 29th, 2007
I love the tagline “A really fast dictionary … fast like a ninja.” ninja words really is litening fast with instant results that show up in your browser window without reloading.
Nice use of AJAX.
Monday, September 24th, 2007
Good article series from Chad Fowler on why rewriting software often goes bad if you do it as a Big Rewrite. Kevin Barnes also has some thoughts.
Monday, September 3rd, 2007
I was having trouble mounting, reading, or writing to an external USB hard drive on my Mac. Trouble was it is formatted with NTFS and I didn’t want to reformat. Solution: install macfuse and ntfs-3g then go to Terminal and type
diskutil list | grep Windows_NTFS
to find your NTFS disk matching /dev/disks, then mount the disk
mkdir /Volumes/ntfs
ntfs-3g /dev/disk3s1 /Volumes/ntfs -ovolname="Fuse Drive"
Also, if you’d like to graphically mount a SSH or FTP share as a drive, install MacFusion. Now I wish MacFusion worked with NTFS too …
Saturday, May 12th, 2007
Arik posted some new photos of the twins. I, of course, prefer these especially goofy ones.
Saturday, May 12th, 2007
Last weekend, I gained another brother-in-law! The wedding was great fun — check out my photos.
Sunday, April 29th, 2007
Millikin University’s Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award
Congrats on being honored, dad.
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
Check out my good friend Steve Hoelzer’s Master’s thesis on reducing blocking artifacts in DCT-coded images (like highly-compressed JPEGs). I enjoyed the clear and concise executive summary.
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
I’ve been doing some more Python development lately. Wanted to document the following decent references online.
Monday, January 22nd, 2007
Last weekend, I became a proud double-uncle when my brother’s family grew from 2 to 4 overnight! Ashley Nicole and Lindsey Grace were born at 12:30 in St. Louis on January 12, 2006.
I posted some photos on flickr, Dad has photos on his website, and the hospital has pictures of Lindsey, Ashley, and both.
Congratulations, Arik and Laura!
Update: Arik has a great picture gallery up on his website now.
Saturday, January 20th, 2007
Now there’s a way to put video back to my TiVo from my Mac. The
interface for turning it on is hidden until you either command-click the
TiVo preference pane or type defaults write com.tivo.desktop FileVideo
-dict-add VideoUIEnabled -bool true into Terminal (this feature is
also known as “TiVoToComeback”).
The original discovery came from this TiVo Community Forum post.
Also, you might find TiVoizer useful in converting videos to the mpeg2 format that TiVo likes.
Suggestion: Eat a Burrito Every Day.
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Steve Hoelzer's Stuff:
sjh blog
ma & pa's publishing (Randy and Shirley Brooks):
english-language haiku
Arik Brooks' website:
the little bro
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Sarah Stopek's business:
Sublime Promotions
Chad and Allison's site:
photos & info
Paul's site:
the friendz
