shwango! blog

Wonderful things happening

osterday — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:42:04 +0000

Jen said I was posting too much tech stuff and she’s right. Sorry about that, but that is what I tend to post about most…Anyway, the baby is doing great. We’re (most likely) having a boy according to the ultrasound. It is quite an amazing thing to see this awesome guy growing inside my wonderful wife. And we get to hear the heartbeat during our monthly (soon to get more frequent) visits to the Midwife center. More and more now I’m feeling the baby crawling around inside Jen - it’s so cool!

I painted the baby’s room a few weekends ago. “Brown Teepee” by Behr is an awesome color! Last week I pulled up the old carpet. The old carpet was pretty disgusting and I’m glad it’s gone. I’d like to keep the hardwood, but Jen wants new carpet installed. Either way, the room is starting to come together! Oh, we ordered the crib and dresser/changing table - really nice looking furiture!

OS X on a Dell Latitude D600

osterday — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:21:50 +0000

Once I got OS X booting on my Dell desktop, I thought I’d give it a try on the laptop, a Dell Latitude D600. I read that OS X would indeed install on the D600, since it does have SSE2 - it’s a Pentium M - using one of the OS X images floating around. I won’t detail the whole process as others have done that. The main down side it that the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 is not supported - or at least not supported well, so I don’t have any hardware acceleration, but I did get it running at native resolution of 1400 x 1050. It works pretty well - speed it comparable to XP and Ubuntu which I also have installed on the laptop. Wireless networking worked out of the box as did sound. The wired network connection required a kext (kernel extension) patch to get working. All in all, not to difficult. Why do this you ask? 1) I like OS X, 2) I can’t afford a new Mac right now and 3) It’s a cool, geeky thing to do.

No, software update doesn’t work for the system patches, but I can live without that for now.

Scissor-switch is where it’s at!

osterday — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 14:07:23 +0000

I’ve been using an Enermax Crystal aluminum keyboard for like a year now and love it. Since I’ll be working from home more once the baby’s born, I’m trying to get my home office as productive (or more) than my work office - that means getting my computer up to snuff. I’ve always liked the feel of laptop (aka scissor-switch) keyboards and the Crystal keyboard has one for desktop use. The new Enermax keyboards - apparently they don’t make the Crystal any more and it was a bit pricey - have the “L” shaped enter key which I detest, so that was out of the question for a new keyboard for home. Luckily I found the Kensington SlimType keyboard while making a pit stop at MicroCenter the other day. For $30 this keyboard rocks! It’s got a really nice feel and the layout is the same as the Crystal. Once again, I’m a happy camper.

Starting to love OS X

osterday — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 02:11:49 +0000

I created my “hackintosh” a few weeks ago on my Dell Dimension 9200. The main reason was so I could check out TextMate - the editor most Rails guys seem to use. I’ve been using NetBeans on Ubuntu for a while now and like it, but just wanted to give TextMate a whirl. Well, after using OS X, I’m really starting to dig it. Not sure if I like it as much as Ubuntu, but it’s better than Windows. Some things take getting use it - like the close/minimize/maximize buttons on the left side instead of the right. Also the application menu always betting at the top of the screen is strange, although in some ways nice. Oh, and TextMate is great.

Bummer - server crash

osterday — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:56:37 +0000

Not exactly sure what caused it, but my server crashed last night around 6:15pm.

Logs just have:
Mar 5 18:13:50 [kernel] eth0: PCI Bus error 8290. Mar 5 18:13:51 [kernel] eth1: Tx timeout - resetting

We’ve been cleaning up the server room and making some changes. One of the guys moved my box a bit and might have jiggled things just enough to cause this.

Ruby Timeout::Error

osterday — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:45:04 +0000

I wanted to post this before, but got busy and now I can’t find the original post about this, but anyway…

When doing network stuff in Ruby - using any Net:: libs - there’s a little trick to trap for timeouts. You can’t simply use “rescue” do handle it. The timeout error is not a subclass of the standard error, so you have to explicitly trap for it:

Woo hoo! I’m gonna be a dad!

osterday — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 19:45:25 +0000

Jen’s going on 11 weeks pregnant now! We got to hear the heartbeat today.

It’s all a bit scary, but so exciting! I’m quite the happy camper!

Ubuntu, xmms and key bindings

osterday — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 22:21:29 +0000

I’ve been using Ubuntu on my home, work and laptop boxes for months now. At work I listen to music almost all the time and find xmms to be my player of choice. I hate all the players that want to be my music manager, etc. - I just want a decent mp3 player and xmms fits the bill. The problem is that xmms is not a Gnome app, which is was Ubuntu has all the standard key bindings for. But I have found a solution that works quite well… and doesn’t require a bunch of custom configs and hacking files all over, etc.

In the Preferred Applications settings applet in System -> Preferences, in the Multimedia tab, I set the “Multimedia Player” setting to “Custom” and then use “xmms -t” as the Command - don’t check “Run in terminal”. Then in the Keyboard Shortcuts applet, I set “Media player” to use the Pause/Break key.

Now when if xmms not running, it’s launched and if it is running, play/pause is toggled.

That’s all I needed! Now I’m a happy camper!

Maybe I should look into xmms2, but haven’t bothered yet.

Test post from ScribeFire

osterday — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:49:01 +0000

Ok, I hate test posts, but you need ‘em! I’m testing ScribeFire right now. Seems ok to me - and I’m not happy with the WordPress editor.

Note: You can do away with the default “powered by” in the settings - click the arrows on the left.

The thing I really dig about ScribeFire is that it’s a Firefox extension so it’s always available without firing up an application.

Firefox tip: editing the dictionary

osterday — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 03:58:28 +0000

Here’s a nice tip for when you accidentally add a mis-spelled word to Firefox’s dictionary.