Tech

Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.

Meme 1: The Dock

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My dock

There’s a meme propagating around the OS X corner of the ‘net right now, started by this O’Reilly article, propagated by Jason Kottke, and since picked up by many others, looking at how different people keep their dock arranged. Bottom, left, or right? Hidden or visible? Magnifying or not? And so on.

So, not being one to let a silly pointless meme pass by, I give you my current dock! I’m sure you’re all thrilled. It’s actually fairly boring at the moment, but that’s partly because I don’t use the dock as a launcher at all, instead preferring to use it only to show currently running applications. As I’ve had this machine for all of five days now, and there were a few restarts as I got things installed and configured, my list of running applications hasn’t grown terribly much yet.

I’ve gotten into the habit of keeping my dock on the right hand side of the screen. I’m right handed, so it’s a very natural movement for me to swing over that way to switch from app to app when I’m mousing around (which is actually a little odd, as on my Windows box at work, I keep the taskbar anchored to the left hand side of the screen — one of them is backwards). Keeping it on the bottom never really worked for me, as it takes up screen real estate that I’d rather have useable for windows — I’m far more likely to want as much vertical space as possible for reading pages than horizontal space.

Here’s what I’ve got running right now, top to bottom: The Mac OS X finder, Pathfinder (a finder replacement), Mail (email), iPulse (system monitoring), iTunes (music), iChat AV (.mac/AIM IMing), System Preferences (not usually open, but I’m still tweaking things), GraphicConverter (excellent graphic manipulation program), Safari (web browsing), NetNewsWire (news aggregator), QuickTime Player (had to watch the Return of the King trailer a couple times last night), and iCal (calendar/secheduling).

Exciting, huh? ;)

Longhorn gets Scoblelized

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Robert Scoble has started a Longhorn blog. Information might be light until the upcoming PDC, but it could be a good source of info on Microsoft’s next OS. I may be a Mac user, but it’s good to keep an eye on the other side of the fence. ;)

A couple thoughts, purely on the presentation. The UI looks bearable, and seems to match some of the leaked Longhorn shots we’ve seen so far. The headers for each of the sections in the sidebar look a couple pixels too high to me, though, like they’re crowding the divider lines. Who knows how much of that is just a web rendering issue (or even a browser issue), though. Comment support, but no Trackback, which is a shame (or maybe Trackback is there, but Robert doesn’t have it turned on — I see a ‘Trackback’ counter under the ‘Statistics’ section of the sidebar).

Code-wise, it’s less of a mess than I’ve come to expect from Microsoft, but it could use some improvement. While the main content is structured with CSS, the overall page is still heavily table-based. Images are missing title tags, and there’s still some ALL CAPS tags used (according to specs, HTML tags should be lower case). Still, it’s at least readable code, which is better than I was guessing I’d see when I pulled up the source, and it doesn’t seem to have any IE-specific nastiness. Maybe there are a few people in Microsoft who are starting to get a clue. ;)

Saving embedded Quicktime movies on OS X

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Thanks to this comment on Mac OS X Hints, I found an incredibly easy way to save Quicktime movies that have been embedded into a page (like, say, the recently released trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).

Well, easy if you’re comfortable with using the Mac OS X terminal, at least.

Simply create a shell script (I named mine getmov) with the following commands:

#!/bin/sh
ditto -rsrcFork /tmp/501/Temporary Items/QT* ~/Movies/$1.mov</code>

Then drop that shell script into your /usr/bin directory, rehash, and you’re set. Now anytime you’re at a page that has an embedded Quicktime movie that you’d like to save, just leave the window open, and call that shell script, setting the destination filename at the same time. For instance, to save the trailer for RotK, I simply typed getmov returnoftheking, and suddenly ‘returnoftheking.mov’ was sitting in my Movies directory.

Trying to get caught up

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So far, I’ve found two (and only two) downsides to the new computer.

Firstly, I need to get used to having a single monitor again. I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup for the past few years with my old Mac, using two 17\” CRT monitors. Once was an old Apple monitor that used the old proprietary Apple monitor connector, and the other was a standard VGA monitor attacheched to a VGA port on a second video card.

I can’t do this on the new machine, though. While its video card has two ports, and will drive two monitors quite comfortably, one port is the new ADC port for Apple’s LCD screens, and the other is a DVI port for non-Apple LCD screens. The machine came with a DVI to VGA adaptor, so I can run one of my 17\” monitors, but that’s it. I’ll get used to it, it’s just feeling a bit cramped right now, and I keep losing windows.

Guess what just rocketed to the top of my wish list? ;)

Secondly, after spending the weekend getting things set up and configured on the new machine — and doing a fair amount of playing and marvelling at the new goodies — I’m way behind in reading all of my usual websites. Uff-da.

So, things have been a little slow for the past few days, but I’m working on getting back up to speed. Small prices to pay, really.

Excluding OS X?

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So I’m in the midst of getting my new machine all configured the way I like it, installing software, drivers, etc. I use a Microsoft Office Keyboard (that’s discontinued), so I hit Microsoft’s keyboard pages to download the software. As I was working my way through the download process (verify system requirements, choose your product, choose your OS, choose your language, and download), I was presented with these choices when choosing my operating system:

Mac OS 10.1 - 10.2.x (excluding OS X)

Anybody want to take a stab at explaining to me just what operating system Microsoft thinks I’m running on my Mac that has a version number equal to or greater than 10.0, and yet excludes OS X?

My new toy!

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So today was the big day — new computers for both Prarie and me! Prairie got a new iMac (which came with all sorts of other goodies), and I got my G5. Once we got home and unloaded the car, we had to memorialize the occasion…

All of our new goodies...

I opened mine up first — I’d been waiting for this for a while, and there was only room on the bed for one of us to unpack at a time, so Prairie was kind enough to let me dive in first. After a minor incident with the knife I used to slit the tape on the box (it’s okay, I didn’t really need that part of my fingertip anyway), I got to see in person what I’d been drooling over online for the past few months.

Two! Count them! Two! Ah ha ha ha ha!

And, just a few minutes later, everything was plugged in and I was up and running. I haven’t installed any really processor intensive applications yet, but even with just poking around at the basic stuff that comes pre-installed, this is so much nicer than my old machine. I’m definitely looking forward to taxing it a bit more in the future — right now, the biggest speed test I’ve had has been with opening iPhoto. On my old G3, with an iPhoto library pushing 2000 photos, it was a good minute or two for the application to open and be ready to use. On the G5? Roughly three seconds.

Oh, and I was highly amused by this. Never having unpacked an iMac before, I wasn’t expecting to see this, but from what we could see when we opened up Prairie’s box — it’s a boy!

It's a boy!

Easy MovableType to TypePad redirecting

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Since this weblog used to be managed using MovableType on my personal server, and I’m working on moving all of my old posts over to this weblog (only one year’s worth of posts left to go!), I’ve ended up with most of my posts duplicated in two spots on the ‘net. I’m also still getting a lot of hits to my old site (and the occasional comment) thanks to all the search engines that still point there.

I’d been planning on diving into the arcana of the Apache mod_rewrite module — it’s a very powerful way to tell your server “if someone asks for this page, send them to that page instead” — to redirect all the hits to this new address, but then tonight I discovered a much, much easier solution.

Needless to say, as soon as I get those last years’ worth of posts transferred over, I’ll be setting this method up.

Here come the ads

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My “Bookshelf” (books) and “Noises” (CDs) lists are back on the site, now that TypePad has given us the necessary tags to work them into our templates. Since I didn’t want to go back to having sidebars on the page, but still wanted to incorporate them into the front page somehow, I’m currently experimenting with an “ad banner” style layout.

Between the 2nd and 3rd posts on At the very bottom of the main page, there’s now the “ad banner” box, displaying the most recent addition to my book and music lists. For books, this is whatever I’m currently reading, and for music, I’m more or less randomly choosing a CD every so often to pop in there. The far right side is simply a link to Amazon. As always, any purchases from these links funnel a few pennies my way. It may not be much, but every little bit helps!

Geek porn!

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Cute girl + Dual 2.0 Ghz PowerMac G5 = Geek Porn! ;)

If all goes well, I should be doing this very thing this weekend. ‘Cept I won’t be nearly as photogenic while doing it. And I don’t think I’d look as good in that dress. Other than that, though, it’ll be exactly the same. Really.