Blog Archives
Apple TV or not?
Any of you have experience with the Apple TV?
I’ve been thinking about ditching cable, and the Apple TV seems rather compelling (Apple lifer that I am). For $99 I reckon there’s no harm in just buying one and trying it (first world problem, I know). Still, it’d be nice to get some input from folks that may have one.
Your input requested. 
Fun with SleepWatcher
I do the majority of my computing work on a MacBook Pro — a laptop computer. The primary reason for a laptop is portability. Sure most of my work gets done at my desk, but sometimes I have to move or want to move. But moving isn’t always so quick and easy because I have lots of things hooked up to the MacBook Pro, like an external FireWire hard drive so I can run Time Machine backups. Trouble is, you can’t just yank out the cable for the disk, you must eject it, then you can remove the cable, else you could risk corruption of the data on the drive. Of course when you’re in a hurry to get out, or just consider we all get absent-minded from time to time gee… this is a pain in the neck and wouldn’t it be nice if we could automate it so we didn’t have to worry about it! Isn’t that what computers are useful for?
As I searched about for a solution, I found a little app called autoEJECT. It’s not bad, but after using it for a few days it just didn’t work like I needed it to. It did unmount things fine, but it failed to mount my FireWire drive. It has an option to “Force Mount”, which I then enabled but when I did so it mounted everything including the secret hidden partitions Apple has for recovery and booting. This is not desired as that 1. clutters things up, 2. exposes volumes that you do NOT want to risk to change. Even then it was a little quirky in how it would remember volumes to mount and unmount and just got in the way more than it was being useful. I figured there had to be a better way.
I found something called SleepWatcher.
SleepWatcher is a system daemon that watches for various events on the system, like sleep and wake, and allows you to execute scripts in response to those events. The app isn’t for novices, and the author actually goes out of his way to make it a bit complicated to use because it’s not a tool for the masses to use. But if you know what you’re doing, it can be useful. So I figured to give it a shot.
Of course, SleepWatcher itself isn’t what does the voodoo. You need scripts.
This website listed a couple scripts.
His sleep script was:
#!/bin/sh osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to eject disks'
and his wake script was:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/diskutil list | \
awk '/Apple_HFS/ {print $NF}' | \
xargs -I{} /usr/sbin/diskutil mount {}
Those are reasonable starting scripts. I thought about changing the wake script to just look for my one volume, because as it is now is ends up mounting all my partitions. Since they’re already mounted it really makes no difference, but it’d just be more efficient to scan for my lone volume. Still tho, this is useful for being complete.
The sleep script I modified slightly based upon what I found here. The change I made was simple:
#!/bin/sh osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to eject (every disk whose ejectable is true)'
which works a bit better in my situation. Granted, this will kick out optical discs, but as I rarely use them it’s not a big deal to me. The author also notes how this will not work if the Finder isn’t running, but I use the Finder and it should always be running (else there’s a problem).
Along the same lines as these is this hint from Mac OS X Hints, but he takes some vastly different approaches in what is selected for unmounting and what is selected for mounting. Not exactly what I want, but it shows what else you can do.
Anyways, SleepWatcher is pretty nifty and reading the code seems to be pretty well written too. Cheers, Bernhard Baeher!
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Announcing kwikkEmail – the kwikkest way to send email
I’m proud to announce kwikkEmail – the kwikkest way to send email!
Read all about it over at Hsoi Enterprises.
(Hsoi Enterprises is my company, as you might guess from the name. Thus…).
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Finally made the leap
I finally did it. I upgraded to Lion.
Seems a little late in coming eh?
I’ve been writing software for a long time. I know how the process goes, and well… I have enough of my own bugs in a day to deal with, I don’t need to be hampered by someone else’s. Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6.8) was working fine for me, and out of the gate Lion had lots problems. Things are better in Lion, with Mac OS X 10.7.3, so maybe it’s time to upgrade.
Still, I didn’t. The main reason was stability. When you’re going through a development cycle, you don’t change your tools. You do this so you don’t introduce change and risk that’s outside of your control. Wait until you ship, then you can upgrade everything. Yes it might mean you get held back for a while, but that’s how it goes. But sometimes you can violate this, and I have because daily use of Snow Leopard was getting to be a problem.
See, at my day job I have to work on a MacBook Pro that runs Lion. The requirements of that project required Lion, Xcode 4.3, iOS 5 target, and so on. So I had to be all on the latest. Very cool for what it is, but well… let’s put it this way. When you use that computer all day and are forced to scroll “the other way”, when you switch to your other computer you get all messed up. I got to a point where I stopped knowing how to scroll and which way went which way on which machine, so any scrolling was always a “ok, just flick one way and if it doesn’t work then reverse direction”. Very inefficient and annoying since you become VERY aware of how much you scroll in a day.
Plus, since I had to work in Lion all day, I got to see that, for the most part, it’s working fine and not getting in my way. So I finally opted to upgrade.
Oye… what a slow, laborious process. Started it last night after supper, still working on it this morning. But now I’m turning on the whole-disk encryption and it’s slowly chugging away at encrypting everything.
The sad part? I think my current MacBook Pro isn’t going to make the upgrade to Mountain Lion. Hopefully that “Apple Event” next week will shed some light on new hardware options.
Technology failures
Too much computer fail right now.
Time-Warner Cable’s RoadRunner Internet has been horrible for me lately. It’ll be up for a while, then go down for a few minutes, then back up, then back down, and just repeat this for too long. That’s been going on for some weeks but I tried to do my best to ignore it. But then yesterday she gave up the ghost. I’m guessing the modem has failed, or something bigger. It’s not an outage, it’s local. Tech won’t come until Wednesday.
This doesn’t bode well for someone who works from home and relies upon Internet connectivity.
It’s good that my day job has me writing connection manager software, so I have lots of 3G/4G USB dongles around. I set up an old iMac with one of the 4G dongles and turned on Internet Sharing to share the 4G connection through the Ethernet port. Then hooked my router up to that iMac. And viola… the household is back online, every device. It’s a lot slower, but at least we can limp along for now.
And then on my server… one of the hard drives is making a funny noise. It’s failing. The bad part is, as I powered everything off to remove the failing drive, when I tried to power it back up it wouldn’t power up. So is the drive failing or the power supply? And a couple other drives in similar enclosures also made the same noise upon turning them back on, but they aren’t repeatedly making the noise. This doesn’t bode well. I’ll be calling Other World Computing this morning to talk about it and figure out a solution.
What with the flooding in Asia and how it’s affected the hard drive market, I was so hoping to avoid buying a hard drive for the next couple years until things recovered. Alas…
Oh what fun.
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Apple iOS 5 Tech Talk – Austin
Yesterday I attended Apple’s iOS 5 Tech Talk here in Austin. I wrote about it at my company blog.
Rather inspired and excited am I about prospects ahead.
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That’s very cool, Moneydance
Readers may remember about a year ago I was looking for a new personal finance program and decided upon Moneydance.
Still using Moneydance. Still happy with my purchase. Sure, some of the Java GUI quirks bug me, but the reality is it does all I want and does it pretty well. I’m pleased.
But here’s something really cool they recently did: they revamped their license. They made it a lot simpler. For personal users, it’s one license per household. Doesn’t matter how many people use it, how many computers it’s installed on, how many different OS’s it’s installed under, how many data files, whatever. And “As always, we promise that we’ll never sunset our software, remove functionality from older versions, or force you to upgrade.” Which is pretty nice. Speaking as a software developer, that’s a tough promise to keep, so I applaud their efforts.
What I also dug was their reasoning:
Why are we making this change? First, because we recognize that the world is changing: households may now be multi-generational, include blended families or housemates, or have other structures which are more complex than two adults sharing finances. Second, because we wanted to even further simplify our licensing agreement. Finally, we want to make it easier for kids, teens, and students to learn about personal finance, and we believe that Moneydance can be a great tool for the entire family.
Very cool.
And this is why I always get AppleCare
Family iMac has two problems:
1. SuperDrive (DVD drive), you put in a disc, any disc, and it spins up then down, then up then down, lather rinse repeat for a minute, then kicks the disc out. Tried a bunch of low-hanging troubleshooting fruit. Looks like the hardware failed.
2. There’s a spot on the LCD that looks like a wrinkle. It’s certainly not a software issue. When I took it into the Apple Store just now, the guy said he’s seen this before. There’s a power supply right at that point behind the LCD… heat.
The work order? For parts and labor, $615 ($400 of that is the LCD screen).
Cost to me?
$0
But only because I forked over the money for AppleCare when I bought the thing. I don’t recall how much it cost me at the time, but right now AppleCare for an iMac is $169.
I say I came out alright here.
I always get AppleCare. Well, I didn’t used to. Way way way back in the day, Apple’s quality assurance on their hardware was high. If something was going to fail, it’d fail within the base warranty and after that the machine would last until normal moving parts might wear out (e.g. hard drives are always eventually going to fail). But then over the past decade or so, quality has slipped. Many of the Apple hardware products I’ve purchased and worked with have had at least one issue in some regard, and I’ve always been thankful for AppleCare because not only was it covered but the repair was always far more expensive than the AppleCare was.
I generally avoid extended warranties, but never skim on AppleCare. Read into that as you will.
And now… let’s see how well Oldest deals with computer withdrawal while the machine is off being repaired.
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Clearing the backlog
I’ve had a bunch of links backing up in my queue, things I wanted to post about. Just going to clear them all in one fell swoop. It’s a smorgasbord.
“What’s Behind The Shocking Collapse in Violent Crime” (h/t LowTechCombat)
A look at the most recent FBI crime statistics, and how violent crime is actually dropping in the US — despite what the media portrays. One possible reason they overlook is the growth of firearm ownership and concealed carry by law-abiding citizens.
TxDPS – Winter Storm Preparedness (h/t TxDPS)
A few simple checklists of things to help you prepare for winter storms. Be it supplies worth having in your car, to dealing with the aftermath of a storm, to helping the elderly.
“13 things a man should keep in his car” (h/t ArtOfManliness)
Going with the above winter storm lists, here’s 13 more things that are just good to have in your car all year round. I’ll take odds with #3 – MagLite was a great old standby but flashlight technology has evolved. Look at SureFire or Streamlight (or even Fenix); for a car flashlight I would want it to run on CR123A’s, because those batteries can sit around for years and still maintain power. I’d also look for a model that can either be somehow attached to say a hat brim so you can work hands free (need both hands to change a tire) and/or that can be rested on the ground and used like a lantern/candle to again shine light hands-free.
Read the comments for more suggestions. Certainly a lot of what you keep in your car will depends upon your needs, your particular car, where you are in the world, and how and where you’ll be traveling.
“Top 10 Secret Features in Mac OS X Lion” (h/t maczter)
I still haven’t upgraded all my machines to Lion, at this point mostly from inertia. But I have upgraded one primary dev machine and am growing to like it. Still, it has some quirks and issues, and this is a nice list of things to help make it a bit more manageable.
“Laws over BB gun use could affect your child’s Christmas“ (h/t NRANews)
While BB guns technically aren’t guns, they certainly can do some damage. You should still treat them like firearms, using them responsibly, adhering to all proper gun safety rules, and using them as a great way to introduce kids to firearms in a safe and responsible manner. The respect and responsibility starts here.
Telecommuting visibility
IT World has a pretty good article addressing the question “Does telecommuting make you invisible?”
My answer? It can, but you can do something about it.
Some background on me. I’ve been at my day job for over 11 years and have worked it as a telecommuter the entire time. I’ve had different bosses, different projects, different teams, but it was always me that was out of the office. At my prior job, while I worked at the company HQ, the project I worked on was hosted out of Toronto, Ontario; that ended up being an interesting hybrid of “in the office” but yet I was still a “remote” that was for all intents and purposes, telecommuting. At the job prior to that, I worked in the office but most of the people I worked directly with were all full-time telecommuters located elsewhere in the world. I got to see and deal with a lot from “that side’ of the fence. So for quite a number of years throughout my entire career I’ve dealt with telecommuting, so I’d like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about it.
On the whole, I’d say the IT World article was spot on.
- Your company’s culture and norms regarding telecommuting
- The percentage of people at your company that work remotely
- How visible you can be on a day-to-day basis to your boss and others
- How effectively you can perform your job remotely
Those are things that will matter and affect how well it works. I’ll add a few things.
Regarding company culture, true that culture around telecommuting matters. If you look at what the article lists on this point, it talks about the company being set up for conference calls, remote access, and other “outside the office” work. Consider this. Is your company large enough that it has more than one physical office? If so, then it’s effectively dealing with telecommuting and other issues of being “virtual” or “remote”. It doesn’t even have to be a true office, maybe it’s a contract shop out in India or Russia. Either way, once the company is forced to go outside its 4 walls, it’s effectively dealing with the very same issues. If your company can be successful with multiple offices, it can be successful with telecommuting. I say this because often companies have multiple offices but are down on telecommuting because they view them differently. Sure they aren’t 100% the same, but for the most part in terms of day-to-day operations, they are. But of course, it can vary and depend on numerous factors, including if it’s a job that can be done outside of the office without incurring much problem and expensive.
Percentage of people can matter, especially because I know some people who may not get to work remotely may come to resent you and your ability to work remotely while they’re stuck in the office, dreaming of working from home. But if you have a larger number of people, or if it’s an option available to everyone, it’s not as much of an issue. This issue then blends into the next issue….
… visibility. This matters, and this is where YOU can make the most direct impact. Sure, if the whole team is geographically spread, that will affect process. If not, or even if still, you can and SHOULD make effort to make yourself visible. Call your boss every day or two just to chat. Call co-workers. You don’t have hallways, a photocopy machine, vending machine, water cooler, etc. around which to just congregate and talk, so you have to find ways to have social chatter as well as business chatter. Don’t be annoying, don’t cross norms or cause a problem, but just work to keep yourself in on the loop with things. Don’t be afraid to CC people on emails because you do have to force the communication. Every Friday send a “weekly progress report” to your boss and maybe even the boss’s boss (and the whole team, if appropriate) so people can be aware of what you’ve been doing all week long. Can you use Instant Messaging? If so, get the whole team on IM and use it as another means of chatter and communication during the day. Plus, IM provides a sort of visibility because, so long as you properly manage your IM, they can see if you’re online or not, at your desk, or not, in a meeting, on the phone, do not disturb, or whatever other status that may come along. It’s useful for visibility.
But be aware to not violate company policies or, most of all, lie. Don’t make things up because you will get flushed out sooner or later if you do. So much of telecommuting is based on trust, so everything you can do to foster and build trust in you, that you are responsible, that you can get the job done? That’s key.
And that brings us to the last point about how effective you are at doing your job. You do have to prove yourself. Well first, you do have to see if it is a job that can be worked remotely: someone on an assembly line just has to be there on the line, no avoiding it. As a software developer, so long as I have electricity and an Internet connection, I’m pretty good to go from anywhere in the world. Or you may find that your job can be done sometimes from home, but from time to time you have to go into the office. Whatever you do, you have to do it and find the balance to make that possible. You have to prove that you can do it, that you can have the discipline required to get the job done. A lot of people tell me they could never work from home — perhaps that is good because they know themselves and what they need to be properly motivated. I would also say, don’t sell yourself short. When you know you HAVE to get a job done else you won’t have that job and the income it provides, it tends to be a good motivator. Yes it’s hard at first to get into the swing, find your discipline, find your groove, but you can get there. Heck, these days if I went back into an office I’m not sure I could be as productive — too many distractions!
Telecommuting isn’t for everyone, but I’m happy to see more of it. There’s many good things about it, if it can be done. The lack of commute has multiple benefits from less time wasted in a day to less impacts on our roads, our environment, vehicle wear and tear. All good things. Less costs. And ultimately, a higher quality of life.
